On The Invisibility of Fanzine Fic and The Loneliness of the FanFic Reccer

A Fanlore volunteer is adding comments from crack van (the fanfic rec community that recently shut down). Her focus is on fanfic that was originally published in fanzines. She shared some of her observations with me....

"I'm filling in zined story comments on Fanlore with comments from Crack Van.

First, the recs themselves are good, but there is almost nothing of value in the comments to them. Lack of substantial online comments, the pithy "that's hot" or "thanks for reccing it" seem to be something that went along with the online journal culture, even early on. I don't generally read comments at AO3, but I wonder if they (overall) have more meat to them?

Second, it's no wonder many, many fans don't know what zines were or what role they played in early fanfic, as the reccers very rarely listed the zine the stories were originally published in. Starksy and Hutch reccers were better than most, but more often that not (talking about older fandoms here), the zines are not even mentioned. It's like the stories popped out of nowhere.

Third, regarding zines: when the story was posted online by the author, there is often no mentioned that it was in a zine first, or it it is mentioned, they don't name the zine by title. No wonder zines are such a mystery to many.

Finally, reccing at Crack Van was a thankless task, no matter the fandom, no matter the year. It was lucky a rec got even a single comment, and when it did it was an aforementioned pithy thing, or a complaint that the link to the story was broken. Demoralizing. I'm amazed that people stuck with reccing there all those years...."